Second Place Winner, January 2006 InterBoard Poetry Competition

Poetry

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Poetry

InterBoard Poetry Competition

Second Place Winner, January 2006

THE MATH GENIUS FIGURINE SOLVES FOR THE INVISIBILITY PROBLEM
Trace Estes
(The Rabbit Hole)

In the beginning, he is so smooth. Pristine.
His problems start when he trashes
all his signs except division,
which he hides along his breastbone.

Whipped out of a loosened Oxford
at the least provocation,
he divides:
his day into increments,
strangers into identifiable subsets,
(all of which deal with threat assessment)
and himself from the herd.

Every evening he jots new variables
onto a chalkboard. They become
an equation he spends
the rest of a caffeine-laced night
attempting to solve--to make things add up.

He awakens with erasures
and no recollection of nearing a solution
for his invisibility problem.
The only sure things are:

with every realignment
of his time,
other people
or of his opinions,
he fractures along a new axis;

and, if he dares to run a thumb along
any of his once-smooth surfaces,
he’s guaranteed a cut.

Judge Ravi Shankar’s comments: “It takes audacity to come up with such a long title and the few poets who have been able to pull it off, like James Wright or Marianne Moore, were at least a touch arch, even when that attitude constrained a subsurface of grief, and so it’s noteworthy that this poem takes it upon itself to imagine such an original character as ‘The Math Genius Figurine’ and such an absurd situation as solving for the invisibility problem. There’s a long relationship between mathematics and music (take Pythagoras’ music of the spheres) and of course poetry and music, and this piece triangulates between the fields, making the crux and language of math the stuff of introspection. The poem posits an initial wholeness, pristine smoothness, and the way Adam was breached for a rib to make Eve, the third person speaker divides along a breastbone, an initial fracture that leads to cosmos of fragments. The poem ends with erasures and no solution to the invisibility problem, and in fact the jagged edges of realignment, ‘of his time, other people, or of his opinions,’ leads to further wounds and creates more distance from that innocent and idyllic past, turning it, with the stately procession of rational numbers, into a place to gash the mind.”